For districts aiming to increase the number of students taking Algebra 1 before high school, a key policy lever could be pulled earlier—when students are just entering middle school.
When the Dallas school system automatically enrolled more 6th graders in advanced math, a greater share of students took Algebra 1 by 8th grade compared with similar districts that did not implement the change, a new study from researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas found.
But the gains weren’t evenly distributed: Hispanic and white students benefited more than Black students.
The policy led to a “substantial, really large increase” in early enrollment in the course, said Dareem K. Antoine, a Ph.D. student at UT Dallas and one of the study’s authors. The findings align with data the district had previously released, showing dramatic gains in Algebra 1 participation.
Algebra 1 is widely seen as a gatekeeper course in high school math, often required for graduation. Taking it in middle school puts students on a trajectory to reach calculus or another college-level math course by their senior year of high school. Students who don’t take Algebra 1 until 9th grade or later typically can’t reach higher-level math courses before graduation.
To expand earlier access to Algebra 1 and support student success, many districts have experimented with different methods, from enrolling struggling students in double periods to providing teachers with intensive training on how to support students at different ability levels.
In 2019, the Dallas schools launched a policy to shift students to an Algebra 1-bound track earlier in the school career.
Previously, students had to opt in to advanced courses in middle school, relying on parental advocacy or a recommendation from teachers. Under the new policy, all students who met a certain cut-off on the 5th grade state assessment were automatically enrolled in advanced math. If they didn’t want to take these classes, they would need to opt out. The change mirrored opt-out approaches in other districts, such as Wake County, N.C.
A few years later, the opt-out policy went statewide in Texas. A 2023 law required districts to automatically enroll 6th graders who performed in the top 40% of the state test or a local assessment in advanced math that would put them on a path to take Algebra 1 in 8th grade.
Findings from Dallas, about which students benefited most and why, could help inform implementation in other areas of Texas, said Daniel Vargas Castaño, a Ph.D. student at UT Dallas, and the lead author on the paper.
Opt-out policy had uneven effects
To compare Dallas students with those who didn’t experience the policy, the researchers created a “synthetic control group”—statistically modeling a “twin” district made up of similar students from elsewhere.
The only difference was that students in this “synthetic twin” district experienced an opt-in, not an opt-out, policy for advanced math classes in 6th grade.
Dallas students who experienced the first year of the policy change were 13 percentage points more likely to enroll in Algebra 1 by 8th grade. Most of this gain was driven by Hispanic and white students.
Hispanic students saw the biggest improvement, reducing the Hispanic-white achievement gap from 20.7 percentage points to 11.1 percentage points.
Black students, though, did not see similar gains. Black students were less likely to meet the eligibility cut-off for the opt-in program. They were also more likely to leave the district when they were eligible. They would have been automatically enrolled in advanced courses if they had remained in Dallas ISD, but the school district they attended for 6th grade didn’t have the same opt-out policy.
“In our findings, we saw that for Black students, student mobility was a big factor in maybe not taking advantage of the policy,” said Vargas Castaño. “Now this policy’s going statewide, I think it’s very important for there to be better communication across districts about the placement of the student and their STAAR [the Texas state test] scores.”
How opt-out policies are designed have ‘implications for equity and access’
Adjusting the cutoff score for advanced middle school courses could also influence these outcomes, said Elizabeth Huffaker, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida’s College of Education who studies math policy.
She referenced a 2015 study from researchers at the University of Connecticut that examined a similar opt-out policy, and found increases in Black and Hispanic student participation in Algebra 1 by 8th grade.
The North Carolina study had a lower threshold for acceleration, she said in an email.
“This higher threshold could partially explain why the [Dallas] policy reduced some ethnic/racial gaps but not others—but we don’t know what that means for achievement of accelerated students yet,” she said.
The study doesn’t track students who entered 6th grade after the 2019-20 school year, and the Dallas district has shared its own data showing that a greater share of Black students have since been automatically enrolled in advanced courses. (The district did not respond to a request for comment.)
Still, deciding where to set the cutoff score is a key decision for other states designing these policies, said Trey Miller, an associate professor of economics at UT Dallas, and an author on the paper.
“Setting the score does have important implications for equity and access. As we showed with our data, fewer Black students were meeting that threshold set by Dallas ISD, which was roughly equivalent to being in the top 40th percentile on the state assessment,” Miller said.
“At the same time, you want to ensure that [students with] access to honors math in 6th grade are adequately prepared and able to be successful in that class.”